It’s been an amazing 36 hours…

First, I discovered that I was one of the winners in Karen Lynch’s Seven Days contest at Live the Power. Just by doing what I normally do, reading Karen’s excellent blog and participating in the conversation there, I ended up with a $25 Gift Certificate to Amazon.com. She also awarded prizes to Pamm of My Secret Spiritual Dance and Priscilla of Personal Development Demands Success.

Thank you, Karen! And another Happy Birthday to both you and Live the Power. May there be many many more! :)

Then I got an email from Kirsten, creator of Positive Thinking Day, who let me know that I’d won an iPod Shuffle, loaded with another creation of Kirsten’s… ipopins, which are really neat, one minute positive affirmations set to jammin’ beats! If you’re curious about them, you can pick up five of them for free by subscribing to the ipopin newsletter.

Once again, this was for doing something that I would have done anyway: adding my support to what I think is a fabulous idea… a day dedicated to the power of positive thinking. Kirsten and her co-sponsors are doing some great work with this. Not only are they promoting positive thinking in a world that can always use more of it - they are also using it to raise funds and awareness for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation.

There are more prizes to come! As of this writing, April Groves (who has a couple of great blogs herself: My Beautiful Chaos and Making Life Work for You) has come in 5th place in the Positive Thinking Day Most Positive Person Contest, and has picked up some neat prizes herself! Four more to go!

Thank you, Kirsten!

You’d think that would be it… but there’s more…

Before I sat down to write this post, I went out and got the mail. There was only one thing in the box - a package from Amazon.com containing the book Open Secrets: The Letters Of Reb Yerachmiel Ben Yisrael, courtesy of my long time blogging friend Nneka of Balanced Life Center!

I’ll say it again - this was for doing something that I would normally do - I participated in Balanced Life Center’s one year birthday celebration by providing Nneka with some feedback on her blog. And she chose to send myself, Rick Cockrum of Shards of Consciouness, and Phil Gerbyshak of Make It Great! a copy of the book.

Thank you, Nneka!

So why am I telling you this?

Partially it’s to express my gratitude to these three amazing women, not only for the stuff, but for all that they do for the world.

But there’s also a lesson here.

I think it was Woody Allen who said that “90% of success is showing up.” And that’s all I really did - I showed up for each of these activities, felt inspired to participate, and did so.

What if I had said “Yes, I’d like to participate in Karen’s 7 Days Celebration, but who really cares what I have to say?”

No gift certificate.

What if I had thought “It would be nice to add a link to support Positive Thinking Day, but my little blog can’t make a difference, so why bother?”

No iPod Shuffle.

Or how about “Nneka’s a much better writer than I am… my feedback doesn’t matter to her.”

No Open Secrets.

The interesting thing is, those thoughts crossed my mind in each of these instances. And the Lyman that used to be would have ran with them and done nothing. But the Lyman I’ve become replaced those thoughts with better feeling ones and took the inspired action that he wanted to take.

It’s good to be pointed downstream. :)

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